Sports in North America tend to be insular. Baseball is not played in many places, and is widely derided by non-Americans as arrogant for staging the World Series. Hockey is played in North America but not many other places, other than the colder parts of Europe. American football is known as American football in the […]

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The American colt California Chrome has landed in Dubai ahead of his first race on foreign soil — the $10 million Dubai World Cup next weekend. It seems possible the decision by Chrome’s owners to run the winner of the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes and Santa Anita Derby at Dubai’s Meydan Racecourse could translate into […]

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  Journalists who work inside the office need to get out once in a while. To see anew how the other half lives. To get reacquainted with the realities of reporting. The untidy and inexact process of going onsite, piecing together what has happened, interviewing people who may not want to talk, making sense of […]

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The UAE won the right to stage the 2019 Asian Cup on Monday … a tournament not well known in the rest of the world but a very big deal in Asia. Almost as big a deal to Asia as the African Cup of Nations is to Africa. Way bigger than North America’s generally limp […]

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Not much ties together these two stories, other than they appeared next to each other on the front page of The National today and seem to recurring themes, here in the UAE. A kid winning one million dirhams in a drawing in Dubai … and a lion being taken from a home in Sharjah.

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Seems like an act of hubris to put up a 79-story skyscraper in Dubai and name it The Marina Torch. Isn’t that sort of asking for fate to intervene? Had the builders never seen (or heard of) The Towering Inferno? So, The Marina Torch, often known simply as the The Torch, got some global notoriety […]

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We are very interested in crocodiles, over here in the UAE. They’re big, they’re ugly, they’re dangerous and they’re here. They do not occur in nature anywhere around the Gulf, far as I know, but that has not stopped the operators of Dubai Mall from bringing over a pair, dubbed King Croc and Queen Croc, […]

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The growth of the UAE’s two big cities continues to intrigue outsiders, particularly those with cameras. Some are more than tourists with camera-phones. This has led to some impressive time-lapse photography of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and now we have a new addition to the canon — an English photographer’s “flow motion” rendering of a […]

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This pretty much had to happen in Dubai. If a real estate scheme seems crazy or impractical, and will cost a lot of money but also garner scads of attention … Dubai is ready and willing. The latest? Underwater homes. Which followed on …

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Rain here produces a reaction rather like snow does in Southern California. “Oh, cool! Come over and look at this! Wow! … Hey, wait. … This is not comfortable to be walking around in. I don’t have the right clothes. And it might even be dangerous to drive in …” It rained real rain today […]

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